


Digitalis purpurea

by melissfiction



Category: Solar Opposites
Genre: Action, Autopsy, Blood and Gore, Crime, Drama, F/M, FBI, Korvo the forensics analyst, M/M, Serial Killer, Terri the villainness and ex-lifemate, Terry the hotshot young detective, Vanbo the asshole villain rival type, a lot of flirting, homicide division
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:07:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27912763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melissfiction/pseuds/melissfiction
Summary: Terry, a carefree FBI officer, and Korvo, an aloof lab geek, investigate a string of interconnected murders linked to Terry's ex-lifemate.
Relationships: Korvo/Terry (Solar Opposites), Terri/Terry (Solar Opposites)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	Digitalis purpurea

**Author's Note:**

> Me??? Starting a new project??? It's more likely than you think. 
> 
> Big warning: this chapter depicts an autopsy. It's probably not the most accurate, but I did put a lot of work into researching. I'm taking some physiology classes right now, so it's cool to include that knowledge in my writing. But anyway, if you like graphic descriptions of autopsy-type stuff, you may proceed!

Terry remembered when she was sweet, before she had a real name. He still pictured her in a white lab coat with their university’s crest on it, two swords crossed behind a green diamond. Before they were lifemates, they were lab partners. He used to try too hard to make her laugh while the rest of the class fretted over how many drops of a purple liquid it took to dye a clear liquid permanently pink. It was the only class he regularly attended, because attendance was actually mandatory, and the only class he passed with an A+ in all his eight years of undergraduate and graduate school. 

Back then, she was 31287 and Terry’s heartstrings would strum heavenly arpeggios every time he saw her eyes smiling under her foggy lab goggles. He got to class early just to have an excuse to be isolated in the linoleum tiled hallway with her and he went to office hours just to listen to her ask the TA questions and he planned every one of their post-lab report writing sessions after their four-hour class just to hear her soft giggle as he complained about the tedious calculations. When he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the light clacking of her fingers as she paraphrased lab methods. Amidst the quiet shuffling of papers and buzzing of printers, her impossibly fast typing always distracted him from the impending 11:59:59PM deadline. He asked her what her typing speed was. It was 168 wpm. 

Terry was nostalgic for those simpler times, saturated in the golden afternoon sunlight and laced with honey-sweet glances across the lab table. Sweaty palms under purple nitrile gloves. Laptop keyboards covered in saran wrap. Neutralizing acids at the end of an experiment with a bubbling slurry of sodium bicarbonate and water. Rainbow emission spectrums. Crushing up spinach leaves with a mortar and pestle to extract the chlorophyll. Terry even missed getting points taken off his lab report for accidentally dropping glass beakers. He would go through all the tortures of the general chemistry and biology series, solving for wavelengths and writing out flashcards of cell organelle functions and all that other busywork that was forgotten as soon as the quarter ended, if it meant seeing his old lab partner look back at him with mirth in her gaze.

The only one wearing a lab coat now was Terry’s new partner: an aloof forensics analyst whose eyes remained dead even when Terry told one of his better jokes. Korvo didn’t wince at the rancid smell emanating out of the mouth of the corpse on the lab table as he gently pried open the John Doe’s jaws for a nasopharyngeal swab. Terry wasn’t surprised. He figured that Korvo and the John Doe had a lot in common, both being cold and dead and emotionless. Terry bet that if he pressed his fingers to Korvo’s wrist, he wouldn’t find a pulse. 

“Cause of death?” Terry asked. 

“The paramedics said ‘heart failure’,” Korvo answered. 

Terry could feel there was a “but” hiding at the end of that statement. “And what does Korvo say?” 

“I’m working on it.” 

Korvo dropped the swab into a slot in a TPL V-9 RT-PCR machine. Terry wasn’t nearly as nerdy as Korvo was, but eight years of being a biology major does teach you a few things along the way. The machine used reverse transcription to convert RNA to DNA for amplification, which was then cross-analyzed against hundreds of cDNA libraries. Korvo was checking the body for viral infection. Odd course of action for the autopsy of someone allegedly killed by heart failure. 

“Korvo, we’re catching bad guys, not curing tepalavirus.” 

“We’d save a lot more people if we focused on the latter.” 

“Oh, save that bullshit for your philosophy class. I need a toxicology report.” 

Terry noticed a small twitch at the corner of Korvo’s lips, curving up into a lopsided smirk. Korvo’s usually dull eyes came alive with a flash of interest. 

“What?” Terry asked. 

“It’s funny,” Korvo said, though it was obvious to Terry that he meant funny-weird instead of funny-ha-ha because Korvo never indulged himself with lighthearted comedy like a real Shlorpian. This was as close to laughing Korvo would ever get. “Seeing you get all fussed up about work while I slack off.” 

It was true. Their roles were reversed. Terry sighed. “Sorry. I’m just… It feels like my fault, you know? Like, maybe if I was just good enough for her, she wouldn’t have left me and become evil and all.” 

Terry looked down at the John Doe. His real name was Thumar, but he couldn’t handle thinking of the corpse as a real Shlorpian with his own complex backstory. John Doe had to stay John Doe, or else Terry wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. John Doe’s light yellow skin was especially pallid under the harsh fluorescent light of the lab. Rigor mortis immortalized his pained expression, contorted into an ugly grimace with every tense muscle frozen in its place. The smell of the corpse helped objectify Thumar as an exercise in scientific analysis. Just another lab experiment. Thumar wouldn’t like having the trials and tribulations of his long, complex life perverted into a mere homework assignment, but, well, he was already dead. Terry could only hope he could make it up to him by catching his killer. 

“How do you know she wasn’t evil from the start?” 

That was Korvo’s unnecessarily cruel way of saying it wasn’t Terry’s fault. Terry understood the translation. Or, maybe he was reading too deeply into it. He was bad with romanticizing their interactions, but he swore he felt chemistry between them. Not just their biological pathways occasionally interacting at every accidental brush of their knuckles against each other when they were alone in the elevator together, but real passion in their dynamic besides their shared goal to serve justice. More than polite professionality. 

“Because I loved her,” Terry said. The way his heart skipped a beat when he saw her from across the room still felt fresh in his muscle memory. “And she loved me. And it was the best thing in the world being in love with her. If that wasn’t ‘good’, then I don’t know what good is.” 

Korvo didn’t doubt that last part. “Have I reached the level in our friendship that’ll let me unlock the tragic backstory of why you two broke up?” 

Korvo was met with uncharacteristic silence. Terry stared back at Korvo blankly, dumbfounded by the question. 

“What?” Korvo asked. He was used to accidentally saying the wrong things in social situations, but he thought it was a fair question to ask. It’s not often you meet someone with a genuinely evil ex-girlfriend with a body count higher than her IQ points. 

“I didn’t know we were friends,” Terry confessed. 

“Oh, fuck you.” Korvo returned to the autopsy. He clipped a few nail cuttings and plucked a single hair from the top of the corpse’s head. He then did a general look-over for any open wounds or substances on the body. 

“No, I’m flattered!” Terry assured him. “I wanna be your friend, Korvo!” And maybe more than that, but that was a conversation for a different time. Baby steps. “I’m glad you consider us friends. I like being friends with you.” 

Korvo was put-off by how often Terry used that word. He felt as if there was a hidden implication he was missing. “Not _best_ friends,” he wanted to establish, “but yes, I do consider us friends.” 

“So, you wanna know why I’m single?”

Korvo didn’t like the way Terry phrased that, but: “Yes, that’s what I just said. Why did you and Van Bi break up?” 

Terry hated hearing her new name. It was an awful reminder that she left him for an obnoxious asshole wannabe supervillain with no depth perception. Vanbo’s eyepatch made no sense. Shlorp had the technology to grow him a new eyeball. But Terry had to admit, the prosthetic cyborg arm looked cool as hell. 

He used to think being nameless was sad, so every time he approached her, he gave her a new nickname. _Hey, girl. What’s up, lab partner? How’s it going, gorgeous? You look great today, babe._ _You’re the love of my life, darling._ He didn’t dare suggest any real names for her because, maybe, that was the point—to be a concept instead of a person. Terry thought of her and that made him happy. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. 

When she was Terri, he thought that meant she was giving herself to him. Now that she was Van Bi, it was obvious she never belonged to anyone. She was an amorphous fluid, taking the shape of whatever vessel she wanted to fill half-empty. She was like sea water, slipping through his fingers, but also drenching him. Drowning him. And he kept trying to hold on to her, but there was nothing solid to grasp. 

“Well, as you already know, after I graduated and got my Master’s in Pupa Sciences, I became a cop. It’s the easiest job on Shlorp, since we live in a utopia and all. All I had to do was three months of training, take a few easy tests, and suddenly my paycheck was higher than hers.” 

“Did you say _three_ months of training?” Korvo asked. “To become a cop? That’s all you need to be certified to enforce the law with a ray gun and all?” 

“All the AI robots do the real work. It really is the easiest job on Shlorp.” 

“I just— _wow_. So you got your Bachelor’s in Biological Science and your Master’s in Pupa Sciences, and then you decided to be a cop?” 

“ _God_ ,” Terry lamented. “You sound just like her.” 

Korvo didn’t appreciate being compared to a wanted criminal. Unfortunately, he empathized with her. “She was frustrated by your lack of ambition,” he guessed. 

Korvo guessed right. It wasn’t as if he stayed a cop. Terry eventually made his way up to Shlorp’s tiny Homicide Division, but that was after the breakup. He tried to prove himself to her, but by then, she wasn’t looking at him anymore. 

“It’s stupid. Isn’t it? What’s ambition supposed to mean? Which class was I supposed to take that would’ve taught me ambition? I passed all my classes, checked all the right boxes, got some fancy pieces of paper, but every day, I woke up and had no idea what I was going to do that day. Didn’t even know what to eat for breakfast, half the time. Doesn’t ambition mean that you’re trying to fulfill yourself? But I never felt empty. How do you fill up a glass that’s actually just a completely flat plate?” 

Korvo’s smirk returned. “You have ambition.” It was laughable, but Korvo didn’t laugh. It was all subtext and reading in between the lines with him. “It’s _her_. I’ve never seen you work this hard, if you even worked at all, before this whole Vanbo case.” 

“Oh.” Terry thought the enlightenment would finally grant him a zen peace of mind, but he felt the same as before: anxious and guilt-ridden and regretful. “Ambition sucks. It’s like trying to fill a glass with a hole at the bottom.” 

Korvo took a tourniquet, a needle, its plastic barrel, some vacutainers, and an alcohol pad. “It’s not just about filling the glass.” He picked up the body’s limp arm and tied a tourniquet to it, prepped the injection site with a few seconds of alcohol pad wiping to clear off any bacteria, and then attached the needle to the barrel. Once the needle was unsheathed, he wasted no time sliding the needle into an arm vein at a 20º angle and anchoring it into the skin. As soon as he inserted a vacutainer into the barrel, it began filling up with dark blue blood. “It’s about finally getting to sip from the glass.” 

Terry wasn’t the queasy type, though he was frightened by how easily Korvo found the corpse’s vein without even bothering to feel around for it. He watched Korvo fill up five vacutainers, then rip out the needle from the vein with no hesitation. The blood samples went into a BHL Toblin machine for analysis. 

“You really don’t have to stay for this next part,” Korvo warned. 

“I used to dissect pupas every day,” Terry said. “I’ll stay.” 

“No, really, just tell me what you’re looking for,” Korvo insisted. The next part was the part where he cut open the body’s chest, peeled back the layers of skin and soft muscle, ripped open unnecessary parts like the rib cage and arteries and ligaments, and then took out all the organs. After that, he still had to weigh every organ, take sample tissues, and store them in glass jars of formalin. Even he felt his stomach weaken at that part. The blood and guts were fine, but the _bones._ Korvo hated the bones. “You think he was poisoned?” 

“I have a theory.” Terry walked over to the box of purple nitrile gloves. “May I?” he asked, with the grace of someone asking a fair maiden to a dance at a gala. 

“Go ahead.” 

Terry slipped the gloves over his hands. He hadn’t felt the texture of thin rubber stretched over his fingers in years. All he needed now was a lab coat, lab goggles, and a TA grilling him over not completing his pre-lab before class. 

“This guy’s got some nasty breath. From all my partying weekends, I recognize that smell being from vomit.” Terry took a cotton swab, lifted up the body’s upper lip to reveal its gums, and took a long swipe bumping along the ridges of the back teeth to the front teeth. The resulting residue on the swab was a soft, yellow gunk. He handed the cotton swab to Korvo. “And vomiting is a symptom of poisoning. Look for digitalis levels in your tests. I think this guy’s tea was spiked with foxglove.” 

Korvo took the cotton swab and stored it in a small glass vial. “Foxglove, or digitalis purpurea—best known for containing digitalis, a cardiac glycoside usually used to strengthen the heart and steady the heartbeat by inhibiting the sodium-potassium ATPase pump, which increases contractility, and increasing the refractory period in the atrioventricular node, which slows down the heartbeat.” 

“It’s her favorite flower. I used to bring her a bouquet of foxgloves to celebrate every new month of our relationship.” She had enough bouquets to adorn every room of her apartment. She ran out of vases quickly and had to resort to using wine bottles, but she never once complained. She would run her finger down the stalks lined with purple tubes of petals like sleigh bells. Every time, she would humor him with a gasp, go through their bit of pretending it was a pleasant surprise, and reward him with a small peck on the lips. “In hindsight, that was probably a red flag. Who the hell has a poisonous flower as their favorite? Should’ve just gotten her roses like a normal boyfriend.” 

“ _Sola dosis facit venenum._ ” 

“What did you say about my mom?” 

Korvo gave a small smile at that. Terry laughed for the both of them. 

“‘ _The dose makes the poison_ ’,” Korvo translated. “That’s the guiding philosophy for toxicology. Chemicals are just chemicals. They aren’t inherently bad.” 

They spoke puritanically of themselves and those around them, but that was only to keep their own sanity. Chemicals couldn’t be held to any standard besides the discovered rules recorded in textbooks, and even those rules may be defied if chemicals chose to. It was strictly science, meaning, they had a rigorous submission to synthetism. They had to beg their feeble logic to make sense of why you can’t ingest whatever you want. Chemistry, reduced to its basest origins, was following rules that hadn’t yet been broken. The proven belonged in the 99th percentile, lacking that final 1% of certainty. Better defined as the reciprocal of unproven, a double negative making a positive—the not unproven. Trying to top a mystery with the burden of normative assumptions was fruitless. 

“Oh, so you’re defending foxgloves?” 

Terry didn’t care about harvesting fruits, though. Chemicals may be good, chemicals may be bad. Sure. His priority was flirting with Korvo. That was a delightful certainty: their back and forth. If it’s Shlorpian-made, the 100th percentile is possible. 

“I suppose?” 

“I pegged you as a hydrangeas guy.” Terry pictured Korvo watering shrubs blooming with blue globes of tiny flowers, soaking the acidic, reddish earth. Hydrangeas were fussy; if they weren’t satisfied with the pH of their soil, they simply passed away. Korvo was careful, though. Terry knew Korvo would have no trouble maintaining the pH of his garden and achieving the bright blue hue he wanted. 

“Hydrangeas are poisonous, too. They have cyanogenic glycoside.” 

“Aw, seriously?” Terry complained. “What am I supposed to get you, then? Hyacinths? Delphiniums? Belladonna?” 

“Literally all of those are poisonous,” Korvo said. Especially belladonna. Belladonna was one of the most toxic plants out there. “But you don’t have to get me anything. All I want is your absence.” 

Terry wouldn’t let himself be shooed off so easily. “This body is one of the biggest pieces of evidence we have against Van Bi.” Getting permission to perform a medicolegal autopsy on Thumar took a lot of convincing. Relatives of old people aren’t usually crying for justice. They don’t have questions that need answers. Thumar already had a foot in the grave and it showed in his pale, wrinkly skin. The only reason Thumar’s replicant gave the FBI the thumbs-up to poke through his rotting remains was because he was curious why his progenitor hadn’t shown any symptoms of treeing. Only Shlorpians that die of natural causes become trees after death. “I need to know every disgusting detail.” 

“You know it’ll take four weeks to get the toxicology reports, right?” Korvo asked. 

“As a matter of fact, I did _not_ know that,” Terry admitted. “I’m still staying, though.” 

Korvo rolled his eyes at Terry’s unwavering resolve. He gave up. He didn’t like having an audience, but it was already dark out and he only wanted to go home. They were the last ones in the building. “Fine. But you better make yourself useful, at least. Get a lab coat and some lab glasses.” 

* * *

Korvo was accepted into both engineering school and medical school. When he received his acceptance letters, his heart told him to pursue engineering school, but one of the doctors he shadowed at the university hospital told him he had talented hands. He was told that his hands could save lives and nobody had ever put hope in him before. He chose medical school because he liked that someone liked his hands. That small moment of flattery carried him for all four years of medical school, even during the nights he wanted to rip apart his textbooks and send death threats to his professors. 

After he got his MD, he intended to go back to school to pursue engineering, but there were too many reasons to put it off. He found a job at the same hospital he used to shadow at. He kept getting promoted. He still had too many student loans to pay off. It was too convenient to stay a doctor and he wasn’t bad at it. Just the opposite. He understood Terry’s dilemma about ambition, only that he had no trouble filling cup after cup after cup, and he was sure he would die of dehydration if he didn’t stop filling the cups placed in front of him. 

Med school gave Korvo a clinical detachment to death. He erected barriers of objectivity between him and the soulless corpses he dissected. While his classmates were fainting, he was knuckles-deep in a cadaver’s guts. Korvo couldn’t forget how derisively his classmate mocked his affinity for operating on dead bodies. _You’re good at this,_ she said. He had never thought to be ashamed of his talent before her comment. He thought he was going to med school to save lives, but he only became surrounded with death. He was too good at it and it made him feel dirty. 

With Terry’s eyes on him, Korvo felt dirty. He made a Y-shaped incision into Thamur, starting at the chest and extending all the way down to the pubic area. He opened up the sheet of subcutaneous fat and muscle like he was peeling a banana and all the while, he felt the heat of Terry’s eyes burning a hole into him. He usually did autopsies alone because he didn’t like having a witness when he committed a second murder on the dead bodies. Like beating a dead horse. Korvo often heard that serial killers chose professions that put them in positions of power, but Korvo didn’t experience a rush of adrenaline as he set Thamur’s appendix aside. That made him feel worse than a killer. At least killers know the weight of their evil deeds, or something. To Korvo, ripping out organs felt as natural as tinkering with a watch.

“Shut up,” Korvo grumbled. 

“I have literally been silent for the past thirty minutes,” Terry told him. 

“I don’t care!” Korvo snapped. “Shut up!” 

Korvo’s breathing was shallow. He could feel every photon of fluorescent light exciting the electrons around him. The whirr of the air conditioner was as loud as a jet engine. Every point of contact between his clothes and his skin was prickly. Cold numbness crept into his fingers. He willed his parasympathetic nervous system to do its job and desensitize him to the everyday phenomena that was usually buried at the back of his mind, but all of his sensations were loud like a killer was in the room. But it was just him and Terry and Thamur, which meant, by process of elimination, that he must be the killer. He had the hands for the job, hands that were just as good at taking lives as they were at saving them. And what lives had he saved recently? None. He only diagnosed health issues after the fact, picking out the biological hints like a vulture preying on discarded remains. 

The body was opened up and Thamur’s intestines spilled out over the side, but Terry hadn’t once looked away. Shlorpian anatomy was a lot different from Pupa anatomy. A lot bigger, certainly. He ogled at the pale blue shine of the organs. It all looked squishy, almost gelatinous. He wondered how easily an appendix would burst in his hand if he just squeezed hard enough. The morbid fascination gave him eureka.

“I get it,” Terry declared. “I get why people kill.” 

“Remember two seconds ago? When I told you to shut up?” 

“It’s my first time seeing it all splayed out like that. Isn’t it beautiful?” 

“It’s grotesque.” 

“Well, grotesque doesn’t necessarily mean ugly. It’s horrific. Caricatured, almost. It looks the same way it does on TV.” 

“Clippers.” 

“Clippers,” Terry echoed, the way he heard in a movie once. 

Terry handed Korvo a pair of large black clippers and watched how fast Korvo was at cutting the rib cage and reflecting back the chest plate to expose the heart and lungs. The rib cage was detached in a matter of seconds, peeled back and set aside. 

“You’re good at this,” Terry commented. 

But he said it with admiration, just like the doctor had when he told Korvo his hands were talented. Korvo hadn’t heard that tone since his undergrad, back when he thought reaching the minimum age to drink meant he was already a fully realized adult. Years later, he knew he was still the same stuttering child that got inebriated off of every ounce of approval he could get his greedy little hands on. 

“Scissors,” Korvo ordered. 

“Scissors,” Terry obliged. 

Korvo cut at the pulmonary artery and then set the scissors down near Thamur’s kidney. 

“Tweezers.” 

“Tweezers.” 

“You don’t have to do that.” 

“But it’s fun!” 

Korvo tried his best not to describe his job as fun, because he didn’t want to attract any vengeful ghosts that resented him pillaging through their dead bodies, but it is _kinda_ fun. Fun like putting a puzzle together. Not exciting, not thrilling, not heart-pounding, but kinda fun. Terry wasn’t ashamed of his amusement. He was playing doctor, wearing a lab coat and safety glasses as if he was at a costume party. It was a novel experience for him, not his everyday routine. 

Korvo pulled out a post-mortem blood clot and set it aside. He picked his scissors up and cut through the connective tissue attaching the heart to the chest, then pulled out the heart. 

“You wanna hold it?” Korvo offered. 

“Oh boy!” Terry cupped his hands together like a poor street urchin asking for spare change. 

“Be careful.” Korvo gently transferred the organ into Terry’s hands. 

There was a slight give as Terry accustomed himself to the new weight in his hands. His eyes sparkled at his new toy. A real Shlorpian heart was a lot different from the stylized cartoons from his physiology textbook. The textbook had bright blue and bright red to distinguish what brought oxygen-rich blood to the body and what brought oxygen-poor blood back to the heart, but a real heart was a pile of pale blue smooth muscle with slightly greenish portions of connective tissue. He recognized a few obvious parts—the aorta, the superior vena cava, the atriums, the ventricles—but the rest, he couldn’t decipher. His degrees really were mere pieces of fancy paper in the face of death. But then again, he specialized in Pupa sciences, not surgery. 

He set the heart aside when he was done gawking at it. 

“You used to do real surgery, right?” Terry asked. “In the university hospital’s emergency room?” 

He and Korvo went to the same university for their undergrad, but never mentioned it. Same graduating class and everything. Probably walked at graduation next to each other and never realized it. They might have had a few lectures together, but Terry wouldn’t know because he ditched every class besides the exams. Their only acknowledgment of their time attending the same college was referring to the University of Shlorpian Sciences’ hospital as simply “the university hospital”. 

“As opposed to fake surgery?” 

“Well, you know.” Terry communicated colloquially only, even in his mission reports. He didn’t care for precision like Korvo did. “Cutting up _alive_ people.” 

“Yes, I used to ‘cut up alive people’.” 

“Did you ever kill anyone?” 

“Of course not,” Korvo scoffed. He got to work on detaching the rest of the organs individually. The lungs, the spleen, the diaphragm, the liver, the kidneys… “If I couldn’t save them, that wasn’t my fault.” He was only repeating back what others had told him, though. 

“Really? You mean you don’t feel guilty at all if one of your patients flatlines?” 

Now Korvo _did_ feel guilty about all the times a patient died on his operating table. Years of therapy—undone. Just like that. All of his old intrusive thoughts resurfaced. “Sh-Shut up! A-Are you just trying to make me feel bad? Well, c-c-congratulations…” He ripped out Thamur’s right lung. “I feel bad!” He was susceptible to the power of suggestion. That was why he tried his best to stay away from people. Keep the good thoughts in and the bad thoughts out. 

“Sorry! I didn’t know that kind of stuff bothered you!” 

Next, the pericardial sac came out. “Of course it bothers me.” Present tense— _bothers._ “That’s why I quit.” Korvo reflected back the diaphragm, then took out the spleen. A dark sea of blue blood sloshed about the chest cavity as Korvo worked, but he was careful to not let a single drop spill out. 

Terry watched in silence as Korvo hollowed out the rest of the body. He marveled at how quickly Korvo worked, how easy Korvo made it seem, how natural it felt to see Korvo tearing away the guts with his shears. Even as Korvo reflected the scalp in short, choppy motions and drilled a whirring blade into the cranium and popped open the skull, it was all professional. It made Terry glad that Korvo was working for the good guys. Van Bi was a genius, but not a med school genius like Korvo. If she slipped up and left anything incriminating on Thumar, Korvo would know. 

Terry kept his gaze on Korvo’s hands. Korvo had dainty hands, with slim fingers perfect for climbing up octaves of piano scales. He made no unnecessary movements. The digits knew exactly where they were meant to be. He thought it was cute how Korvo had the smallest glove size in the whole forensics department. If only he could take the place of those purple nitrile gloves, so he could learn every one of Korvo’s knuckles. He bet Korvo’s hands perpetually smelled alcoholic from hospital-grade hand sanitizer. 

After cutting through the necessary nerves and the tentorium, Korvo delivered the brain. 

“It’s a girl!” Terry announced. 

Korvo smiled. He felt calmer now, after being given time to go through the familiar motions and let the bad thoughts wash away. He handed off the brain to Terry so he could work on tearing out the dura mater, the thick white membrane of dense connective tissue under the skull. Once removed, it would be easier to visualize any skull fractures. Dark blue blood pooled at the bottom of the skull. 

“Look closely,” Korvo said. “You notice anything?” 

Terry stared into the shriveled-up wrinkles of gray matter. He half-expected to be able to read Thamur’s last thoughts off of the pale pink tissue. Vaguely, he identified frontal lobe, the occipital lobe, the cerebellum, and the left and right hemispheres. He compared its size to the empty skull. “It’s a little small?” 

“Neurodegeneration. He had Alzheimer’s.” 

“Ah, that explains a lot.” 

Thamur was a politician. He served five terms in the Shlorpian Parliament, but before that, was the mayor of Terri’s home sector. Despite working for the government, Terry never understood politics. He especially didn’t understand any of Thamur’s policies: anti-meteor prevention, anti-evacuation preparation, anti-Shlorpian rights. Terri used to go to town hall meetings to harass him. His speeches made even less sense toward the end of his career. 

Thamur was already at the end of his time on Shlorp, much older than Van Bi’s usual targets—young, cocky elites with a particular talent. Terry understood why she would want to get rid of Thamur in general, but trying to fit him into the larger pattern of poisoning-induced heart attacks was like trying to fit jigsaw puzzle pieces into a crossword puzzle. Terry was always good at thinking outside of the box, though. 

“You know what Van Bi took from Thamur, Korvo?” 

“His life?” 

“Okay, yeah, true. But also his _after_ life. That’s all he had left, considering how severe his neurodegeneration was.” Terry was seeing a theme. The other victims, too, had their prized traits desecrated. Zallux had his beautiful eyes gouged out. Sofrina had her heavenly voice choked. Diplin had his athletic legs amputated. “That was his last chance at reconnecting to Shlorp, to root into the soil and exhale the oxygen we breathe in. That’s what he said ‘all his years of service to the community’ amounted to—a fulfilled afterlife.” There was another theme. Sacrifice. All of Van Bi’s victims had dedicated their life to some cause, some passion, some belief. “Van Bi is trying to tell us that no matter how monumental your achievements are, she can take it away.” 

Terry got the feeling the message was directed at _him,_ specifically. Of course she decided to become a serial killer as soon as he rose to the top of the Homicide Division. She loved knocking him down. 

“You’re good at this,” Korvo remarked. 

“Well, I _am_ her ex-lifemate. And I happen to already be familiar with all of her victims—” 

Another theme. 

Terry peeled his gloves off, let them fall to the floor, then quickly got to work on taking off Korvo’s gloves too. 

“T-Terry!” 

Two more purple nitrile gloves fell to the white linoleum tiles. Terry lightly traced his fingers down from Korvo’s elbows to the tips of his fingers, He looked into Korvo’s eyes and interlaced their fingers. 

“Your hands, Korvo… Has anyone ever told you that you have nice hands?” 

The realization dawned on him. 

“Y-Yes. My hands… are my favorite part about me.” 

Korvo was going to be Van Bi’s next target. 

Terry squeezed Korvo’s hands tight. 

“I won’t let anything happen to your hands, Korvo. I swear... I’ll protect you with my life!” 


End file.
